Effective medical education should be needs-based, interactive, practical, delivered in bite-sized portions, and give learners the opportunity to reflect on what they have learned. The four steps to achieving practice-changing education are:

* defining the educational need* setting learning objectives* designing a format to best deliver the objectives* evaluating the effectiveness of the learning delivered.

Needs assessment can be conducted in various ways, including market research, interviews, literature searching, surveys and self-assessment, or a combination of these. It is important to consider the desired outcome at the beginning, as this will form the basis of the learning objectives. Interactivity and flexibility are at the heart of all learning programmes. The design needs to incorporate a variety of different learning styles for best effect, and bear in mind that the optimal learning window is 15-20 minutes. Evaluation of learning should be based on the learning objectives, ideally set at the same time. Post-testing, rating scales and case studies are all good tools for evaluation. Allowing time for participants to reflect on what they have learned and how they might put it into practice is critical.

[For the avoidance of doubt: this video is intended to be freely accessible to all. Please feel free to share and use however you like. Cheers, Peter Llewellyn, Director NetworkPharma Ltd and Founder of the MedComms Networking Community activity at http://www.medcommsnetworking.com]